Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

Kintana, Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA

Kintana Accelerators
> Application Deployment Automation

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

Global enterprises and system integrators struggle to deploy enterprise application projects on time and within budget. Kintana’s customers are focused on improving the quality and productivity of their large-scale implementation projects. A car manufacturer, a high-tech manufacturer, and a system integrator, all of whom were implementing Oracle applications, were among the reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Improving the productivity of and automating the workflow among the DBA, development, and test groups

§ Eliminating manual errors from the code migration process

WHY KINTANA?

Kintana enables IT to reduce costs while improving the speed and quality of its application deployment processes. Kintana Accelerators are pre-configured implementations of its Technology Chain Management (TCM) solution for companies implementing leading enterprise applications. Kintana’s Enterprise TCM suite brings integrated automation and collaboration features to portfolio and program management, IT process management, request management, initiative management, and deployment management. Pre-built Kintana Accelerators are available for Oracle’s E-Business Suite, SAP, PeopleSoft and BEA WebLogic.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Enterprise application implementations are complex projects prone to costly inefficiencies. At the individual database analyst level, Kintana Accelerators take hours out of the process of migrating new changes from development and test environments into the production version of the application. By using programmers’ time more effectively, Kintana’s customers have reduced project costs significantly, especially when the programmers in question have been third-party consultants.

Enterprise innovation: In a large organization, an implementation may involve hundreds of distinct development projects. Project teams struggle to keep track of their progress, and this can lead to customer-visible errors, missed opportunities, and blown deadlines. Kintana Accelerators enable groups to drive consistency across all of their testing and migration processes. In one instance, a Kintana customer is establishing visibility across 300 related development efforts connected to the core project.

Technology gains: In managing the life cycle of popular commercial applications, implementation teams have reinvented the wheel many times. In today’s business world, in which resources and budget dollars are scarce, project teams can benefit by focusing execution around best practices. One Kintana client is relying on the system to guide an enterprisewide project with hundreds of developers. Kintana Accelerators have allowed the company to identify bottlenecks in their testing and application maintenance processes. Ultimately, the audit trail that Kintana creates allows the project team to enforce accountability.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: When a company replaces an informal, paper-based workflow system with an automated approach, it is necessary to discuss, clarify, and define processes formally before moving to Kintana Accelerators.

Learning: Developers find Kintana scripts intuitive but will need training on how to map business process workflows in the Kintana environment.

Resources: System documentation is a prerequisite for automation. Kintana Accelerators require complete, accurate information about the application implementation environment.

Fit: Large organizations that depend on popular commercial software applications should consider Kintana Accelerators as an integral part of the IT infrastructure.

COMPANY INFO

Kintana, Inc. is a private company with 290 employees.

877.546.8262
www.kintana.com
Published: January 2002